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Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2018-07-13

This week started off with the release of the macOS 10.13.6 and iOS 11.4.1 updates – quite unusually posted on a Monday.

Later this week, with another weird scheduling, Apple released new MacBook Pros. The 15“ MacBook Pro can now be configured with a six-core i9, up to 32GB of RAM and up to 4TB of SSD. The 13” MacBook Pro can now be configured with a quad-core, but retains the 16Gb max RAM limit. It also includes the T2 system controller which was so far exclusive to the iMac Pro.

The T2 chip is what controls (among other things) the Secure Boot process and controls the booting off external drives. Apple has updated the support articles and it is official:

Mac computers that have the Apple T2 chip don’t support starting up from network volumes.

Now, Apple has upgraded their flagship product to Secure Boot. Even when so far admins could ignore the limitations of the expensive iMac Pro, soon Secure Boot will be everywhere. Installation-based deployment workflows should be already in place or a top priority for every Mac Admin.

And finally, this newsletter and my website will be going into vacation mode for the next five weeks. That means no newsletters and much fewer blog posts. I hope you all get time to enjoy some summer vacation as well. I will keep gathering interesting links that I find during that time and restart with a summary of the summer time in late August.

MacAdmins on Twitter

Rich Trouton: “When and how do you really know that you built a robust deployment solution? When you essentially stop paying attention to it for a month, while it’s in daily 24–7 use by others, and that’s OK; everything worked fine.”

Victor (groob): “Yes, for both commands InstallApplication and InstallEnterpriseApplication no longer appear to have concurrency issues.… ”

Victor (groob): “You thought one @micromdm_io was enough? Not a photoshop #macadmins… ”

Filippo Valsorda: “For when you want to figure out how to apply some macOS preference from the command line, without Googling for hours for out-of-date defaults commands: $ defaults read | pbcopy # make changes in System Preferences.app $ diff -u -F ’^ ”’ <(pbpaste) <(defaults read)”

Graham R Pugh: “I improved my macOS Erase-Install script. Now it can cache macOS installer ready for later use, and it automatically selects the current production version of macOS: https://github.com/grahampugh/erase-install”

John C. Welch: “if you’re on mojave beta 3 and your script menu scripts silently fail, resave them as apps. Then you get the “authorize” dialog. Bug filed.”

Rene Ritchie: “I don’t look at it as buying an app (or song or book or whatever). I look at it as supporting creators who make things I value. If I don’t do that, I risk it becoming unsustainable and not getting the next update or app (or game or movie or whatever.) It’s an investment.… https://t.co/llpRFSZniM”